Montessori Phonics & Reading

From A-Z, children are taught all the letters of the English alphabets as well as their sounds through a fun and easy to remember phonetic song. Their knowledge is further reinforced through hands-on craft related to the letters as well as reading words that start with the letters.

Having the right grip is vital for comfort, accuracy and speed. Children are guided on the proper way of holding a pencil. They also practice on the correct stroke directions and steps of every letter.

Our young ones are taught to identify and recall the sounds of words, allowing them to easily articulate words when they read them. Without knowledge of beginning sounds, children would take longer to process each word they see before reading it. Once again, the knowledge of these beginning sounds are reinforced using carefully curated reading materials.

Ending sounds, complemented with beginning sounds, help kids identify and read words with ease. 

Sounds becoming slightly more advanced when it comes to blends as children are taught to merge sounds in different letters into one blending sound. These sounds introduce them to slightly complicated words with blends in them. Reading difficulty is also raised at this stage with exposure to more words and words with greater difficulty in pronunciations.

CVC or Consonant-Vowel-Consonant words are taught to the kids. These words include ‘short A’, ‘short I’ and many other variations of vowel sounds. As usual, knowledge is strengthened through specialised worksheets and reading booklets.

The enunciation of words cannot be complete without the awareness of middle sounds. Our children become more confident with words, even the ones that they may have not seen before, as their expertise and experience grows.

Students are at the final stages of the phonetic learning curve. Ending Blends are present in advanced words that do not have ending sounds of typical letters. Rather, their ends are the merged sounds of two or more letters, also known as Ending Blends.

Diagraphs are not blends. They are two letters combined but their sounds are not merged from their individual sounds. Sounds tricky? Well, not so for the students who have passed this stage 🙂

Our children learn the sounds of short and longs vowels together with the different words associated with them. This is like their “Aha!” moment when they discover how the same letters sound differently in different words. 

Yes, you did hear it correctly. It is Diphthongs. These are sounds of two vowel letters that combine. It’s a bit like singing (or maybe not 😉 With the knowledge of diphthongs, children read words with diphthongs in a clear and crisp manner. 

When students reach this stage, they get a bit bossy as they have mastered their phonics and are, if applied accurately, great readers. Bossy R is the change in the sound of vowels when they combine with an ‘r’.